No, It's Not 1933

 I've seen it online and I've had people express the concern to me in person: I'm really worried that if Trump gets elected, it could be the end of democracy in America.

Or as a Facebook status I saw being shared around stated it somewhat more bombastically: "If you ever wondered what you would have done if you had lived in Germany in 1933, you might find out come November."

I've been on record since 2016 on why the Nazi analogies show zero understanding of what Weimar politics were actually like (multiple parties with violent paramilitary wings battling it out openly in the streets, in a country with very few functioning institutions of classical liberalism.)

The first Trump presidency had some distinctly positive results and also some bad ones. Trump's full dive into conspiracy theories to argue that he had not actually lost the 2020 election was perhaps its worst hour, ending in the bathos of MAGA protesters storming the Capitol building.

With that as the final note, and the ground that Trump has covered since, I don't think we have reason to think that a second Trump term would be any better than the first, and some good reasons to think it could be worse. There are legitimate reasons to worry about Trump being elected. (There are also extremely legitimate reasons to worry about Biden being elected.)

But all of this "what you would have done if you had lived in Germany in 1933" talk is, frankly, far more dangerous than either candidate.  Nor is it only happening in odd corners of social media.  Here's the latest cover of The New Republic:

And every few days a newsletter from Yale historian and best selling author Timothy Snyder lands in my inbox informing me yet again that the US is on the brink of a complete fascist take-over.

Back in 2016 there was an essay which was much discussed in conservative circle entitled The Flight 93 Election.  It's basic contention was: If Hillary is elected, the US is over. Totally over.  She is like the terrorists who took control of Flight 93 on 9/11. It's possible that if we fight her and take over the plane, we'll crash. But if we don't, we're absolutely going to crash. So we need at all costs to elect Trump, even if he may himself destroy the country, because it's the only slim chance we have of the country not being totally destroyed.

I thought it was a bad argument then, and I continue to now.

However, with all this "it's 1933, what will you do?" talk across the left, I'm concerned that Flight 93 has become the dominant paradigm for partisans on both sides.

This is incredibly dangerous. Why?

Say that someone really thinks it's true that if Trump is elected he will turn the US into a fascist dictatorship along the lines of Nazi Germany. Isn't it a constant trope of ethical dilemmas and fiction that stopping Hitler justifies...  pretty much anything? Overturning an election. Attempted assassination. Civil war.

So either these claims of "this is like 1933" are a massive exercise in irresponsible hyperbole (in which case people should stop) or they are a way of saying that people really should overturn elections and commit violence if necessary in order to keep Trump out of power. After all, isn't that what people would do to stop Hitler?

This would be increase the danger to our country even if the GOP under Trump really is pretty dangerous and bad.  Why?  Because once one side of the political spectrum starts engaging in force instead of politics, things can head into a death spiral where the only way to win is to be more successfully violent.

Look at Spain as it spiraled into the Civil War, or Germany as it plunged into chaos at the end of WW1. Back in 1919 (14 years before the Nazis came to power) just as the German Republic was trying to pull itself together, the Spartacist Uprising ended up with the Social Democrats and the Communists fighting it out in the streets of Berlin -- not just with small arms but with machine guns and field artillery. Around the same time the attempt to create a Bavarian Soviet Republic ended in similar street fighting.  In both cases the government ended up seeking and getting the support of veterans paramilitary organizations which, over the following fourteen years, would be integrated into the support of the Nazi party.

So to put it simply: one of the things that caused Nazism was upending the political order to try to defeat the right.

Not only did these kinds of breakdowns in political order make people willing to support an apparently strong man to restore order, the repeated use of political violence and intimidation and fear of those by both sides is what created the permission structure for civil strife and then oppression.

Fanning political division by telling your side that they're going to be destroyed and oppressed if the other side wins makes it more likely that both sides will resort to violence and oppression.  It is a no win tactic, and it is the tactic most likely to lead to violence and oppression.

This is the number one thing I think Americans need to learn about the actual history of oppression. It's not some sneaky thing where after everything has been quiet and normal for years you suddenly wake up and realize that you're living under a vicious dictatorship because you weren't awake enough to notice it coming.

Rather, oppression is invited in because people think they need it on order to protect them from the other guys who are even worse. And the real, bloody, heavy handed oppression is enabled when people enter into a war footing. That might be an external war: oppression under the Nazis was worse and bloodier in the territories they conquered than in places like Italy that still had semi-functional government. Or it might be an internal war. The most oppressive left wing and right wing governments of Central and South America during the Cold War and since mostly sprang from long simmering civil wars in which one side was trying to root out the side's militias.

So am I some sort of Dr. Pangloss insisting that everything will be fine?  What should someone do if they really think that if Trump wins in November he may try to do illegal or oppressive things?

No, I'm not simply being sunny. I'm not saying that people should be calm simply because I don't think anything bad will happen.  I'm saying that even if it's true that Trump is absolutely terrible and bent on doing evil and illegal things, the best things to do would be:

- Vote for someone else
- If he wins, remain peaceful
- Make legal challenges to illegal actions (remember that despite all the attempts to undermine our courts from the political left, they stood as a bulwark against both the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and other Trump over-reaches)
- Vote against his party in the next elections

What you should not do is engage in this kind of behavior or make excuses for it:

And what you should also not do is push the entire situation to become more extreme by upping the rhetoric. When either side claims that this is a Flight 93 election and the country will be destroyed if the other side wins, they increase the danger for all sides.

We are all in this together, and the only way to go from being a two party state (where the other side always has a good chance of winning) to knowing your side will always win is by yourself becoming the dictator.